Once installed, only one shortcut is available to make and upload your program on the Arduino board: Command-Shift-A

You can clone/fork the project from Github too, make your own repository and I’ll be glad to add your patch to the current simple bundle.
And come back during the week, you’ll surely see some update during the intensive RepRap hack session!

Great news today for RepRap at Las Indias: the mechanical machine has just been ordered from BitsFromBytes, and it should arrive in Madrid in 3-4 weeks.

Fully assembled and tested, in a wooden crate for easier transportation, I’ll hope to have the time to make some demo at the end of the month.

What’s missing:

electronic: we already have all electronics, but it has became a bit obsolete over the last few month, it would be great to upgrade it to Arduino platform;

experimenting: we’ll need to melt stuff then, and see how it reacts. Faboroni, another fabbing project, has made a recent experiement with various cooking material (chocolate, cheeze, …). And I’ll need to find a source to buy some plastic polymers, or make our own.

After a lot of debugging on bbvablogs.com, I needed serious fun to keep it up, and suddently I found the perfect project to remove the dust on my arduino board: a blinking led that would tell us when someone is visiting the website!

The issue with decentralizing my living place it’s really hard to be at the right place at the right time. As an example I missed the 24C3 conference in Berlin last week, which was replaced by Wii session, not too bad 🙂

Hopefully, all these lost moments tends to be more and more digitalized, so here are the conferences I found the most interesting so far:

What is terrorism?: a german woman speaking about the experience to see the police busting her house to take her boyfriend away, under the suspicion of terrorims, with various accounts about the intelligence methods in place to monitor her family and friends. Conclusion: keep your mobile phone switched on if you don’t want to be suspected as a terrorist. [mp3]

Hacking in the age of declining everything: a hacking environmentalist session, where everyhting on Earth seems to go to disaster, and how certain societies deal with it, or not. A climate-change speech, oriented to geek audience, with a great speaker. [mp3]

Design noir: Electronic engineering is easy enough today to provide some power to individual purpose: someone launches an idea like tv-be-gone, and anyone can modify it to his/her own benefit. Repeat the process to switch of your own external world annoyance. [mp3]

There are plenty more of conference I want to listen, mostly concerning Storm malware which made a big buzz during 2007. Here comes interesting links from 24C3 if you want to discover other interesting sessions:

One of the interesting part with Twitter is its worldwide use. On my Twitter, I usually get European twitts at the end of the afternoon, and South-American twitts during the night.

Comparing my twitting habits with those of my friends, each one of us could have a twitting timezone, that we’ll be surely different even if you live in the same ‘real’ timezone.

Here is a screenshot of what could be the result:

It could be easily done using the API, unfortunatly, Twitter reduce the API use to one request per minute, so it’ll take one hour to build such a timezone with all your 60 friends… but I’m pretty sure someone will have fun to do something like this soon.

The original project for tonight was to build a 3D LED cube, and the not-so-clever idea was to compact it the size of a normal dice.

Big mistake: first it was hell to solder all the tiny intersection of led cathods, then there is no way to pile up the array of leds if you don’t let space between them… maybe there’s a solution to that, and I’ve not find it yet.

Anyway, it was ready to connect to Arduino board, and to try to program this new led-matrix. Easy and fun, only problem is debugging messages while verifying source code on Arduino software that doesn’t help much, I’ll have to learn more about its syntax limitations.

Here is the result, 5 days before returning to Toulouse to visit Claire: